Piers Paul-Read

The late J. G. Farrell, author of Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur, used to say that he never read novels by contemporaries: the bad ones bored him while the good ones upset him because they had been written by someone else. I do not know what he would have made of William Nicholson’s The Society of Others, but for me it is a novel that I would dearly love to have written yet one whose message is an antidote to envy. It is exciting, funny, wise and beautifully written. The hero is a young man of 22 who, having graduated from university, remains shut up in his bedroom paralysed by a black cynicism. I see things as they are. Nature is selfish. All creatures kill to survive. Love is a mechanism to propagate the species. Beauty is a trick that fades.

Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the few contemporary British novelists who successfully integrate the political with the personal in the lives of his characters. Like Graham Greene, he has an eye for a dramatic historical backdrop: in The Dancer Upstairs, it was the Shining Path insurgency in Peru; in his new novel, Snowleg, it is the communist regime in East Germany. The story opens when Peter Hithersay, a pupil at an English public school, is summoned home to celebrate his 16th birthday. There his mother tells him that his real father is not her husband, Rodney — an ‘affable and diffident’ commercial artist — but a fugitive East German political prisoner whom she had harboured for one night while competing in a choral competition in Leipzig.